Re: [Leica] Re: Haas

[Brian Reid <reid@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>]

This argument about the Haas web site is, morphologically, the same
argument we had a couple of weeks ago about email programs and return
addresses. It's an important principle--nay, the primary principle--in
the profession of communication systems engineering, and we can't get
the public to care.

If you had a phone that could call 90% of the phones in the world but
was utterly unable to reach the other 10%, whose fault is it, and who
has to fix it? 

There are two ways to design a communication system:

 1. Have a global monopoly that makes and controls everything, so that
all products can interoperate. Punish people who attempt to make
something different. This is how the telephone system worked for 80
years. 

 2. Have a global set of standards that, if followed, will enable
products to interoperate. Use market forces to pressure companies into
designing products that interoperate by reducing the market value of
incompatible products.

What we have in the computer world is an attempt at #2, but Microsoft
trying to accomplish #1. There exists a well-defined, well-understood
set of global interoperability standards, and if both sender and
receiver follow them, then anybody can communicate with anybody. But
Microsoft has achieved very close to a monopoly, and they utterly
ignore the standards.

If most people have Microsoft browsers, but not all people, and if most
web site designers think that most people have Microsoft browsers, then
there exists a world in which you can follow Microsoft-supported
standards instead of globally-agreed standards, and things will "mostly
work" for "most people". Ditto for email systems, or anything else
where two people who have never met are trying to communicate. 

The rule is very simple: when sending, follow the standard slavishly.
When receiving, be as liberal and accepting as you know how. There is
nothing deeply wrong with using private standards, but they have to be
negotiated and not assumed. You can't just start sending something
incompatible, you have to ask permission first. And, in some cases, the
situation requires that you not be allowed to negotiate outside the
standard. Air traffic control, for example. Air Traffic communication
is in English. If an Arabic pilot is landing a jetliner at a Russian
airport, the communication is supposed to be in English. If they
negotiate to have the conversation in Russian or Arabic, then it will
be incomprehensible to other airline pilots and something dangerous
might happen.

The Ernst Haas web site uses a communication method that is not part of
the accepted intercommunication standard, but whose creator (the
method's creator, not the Haas site's creator) paid Microsoft a fee to
be compatible with it. Then it (the Haas site) bungled the negotiation
for nonstandard protocols. The Haas people either didn't know about
this standards stuff, or didn't care.

The Microsoft monopoly will eventually fade away, but until it does,
the universality of global communication is not guaranteed. You can
help by finding a reason not to communicate using Microsoft products
unless you are expert enough to be 100% certain you are using them
responsibly. Or you can do what almost everybody else does, which is to
say "ah, fuck it; it works for me, why should I care about global
standards?"

Brian